The Ghost of Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900–1938) was a prominent American novelist in the early part of the 20th century. He was part of an influential group of American novelists in the first part of the century, including Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who have influenced countless authors. Wolfe is notable for developing the technique of autobiographical fiction, in which the author uses events and experiences from his or her own life to create a fictional story. He is also known for one of his books’ titles becoming a common saying in the American lexicon.
I had never heard of Thomas Wolfe until I was an adult. This seems almost scandalous to me looking back, having a mother who is a retired English teacher and having graduated with a liberal arts degree in my undergraduate years. I learned about Wolfe chiefly from author Pat Conroy, who has described Wolfe as one of his literary heroes and most influential writers. And after I read Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), Wolfe became one of my literary role-models and heroes as well.
Much of Wolfe’s writing is introspective and looks at the human condition. Look Homeward, Angel is about a young man named Eugene Gant, who yearns to escape the narrow confines of his small hometown in search of a better life. Gant is portrayed as a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel was a story that closely resembled his own life. His largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers and writers, including some of today’s most important novelists.
The protagonist in You Can’t Go Home Again, George Webber, is a fledgling author who has just published his first novel to widespread critical success and acclaim, a story based loosely on his hometown (“Libya Hill” in the book, based on Asheville) and its residents. But when Webber returns to the insular and narrow-minded Libya Hill, he is greeted with outrage by its citizens who feel he has betrayed them with his depictions of them. Shocked and unwelcome, Webber leaves Libya Hill and sets out on a search for identity beyond the narrow confines of what his former friends and fellow citizens of Libya Hill would place on him.
Wolfe acknowledged that both novels were based in many respects on his own life experiences, and the wanderlust of Eugene Gant and George Webber were his own. Wolfe entered college at just 15 and eventually attended Harvard and earned a Masters in his early 20s. His travels thereafter took him to Europe, where he wrote the manuscript for Look Homeward, Angel and had it published back in the states when he was 29. It caused such an uproar in his native Asheville that he had to stay away for another eight years. The uproar caused by his first novel formed the basis for You Can’t Go Home Again.
The themes of yearning for a better life, of seeking what else exists beyond the limited confines of our adolescence, and the wanderlust some engage in throughout life are constant in Wolfe’s novels. Unfortunately, he passed away at 38, and we were robbed of any additional explanation as to the root of this condition.
I myself am a victim of wanderlust, and when I read about Eugene Gant and George Webber, I identified with them. The characters resonated with me. Later, when I went into the Marine Corps and had to move around the country every two or three years, it only brought out and rewarded that part of me and made me want to wander even more. This might to the uninitiated seem like some kind of affliction. But as Tolkien famously observed in his poem, “All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter,” not all who wander are lost.
In late October of this year, I turned 48. I don’t feel like 48; I feel more like 28. But with one son a sophomore in college and the other a high school junior with less and less need of Dad being around to get in his business, I suddenly over the past couple years discovered I had what seemed like a ton of time on my hands. And a few weeks prior, my wife and youngest son made plans to travel back to our permanent home in another state for a family visit, leaving me a “geo-bachelor” for the weekend.
In military parlance, a geographic bachelor is someone who lives and works at his duty station while his family lives somewhere else. This might at first glance seem like a fun thing to be alone, but when you’ve been married for over twenty years and have a family, it actually isn’t fun at all. Even when I am away for just a few weeks, I tell people it’s just like being deployed, except you have your personal vehicle and can have a drink (unlike in places like Iraq or Afghanistan). There’s also indoor plumbing and no dust on everything in morning when I wake up, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same as being deployed away from your family. Weekends away from one’s family can be, as the character John Bender from the Breakfast Club noted, “Demented and sad.”
These things were weighing on my mind as Friday approached and the prospect of an empty and boring weekend in DC was coming into clearer focus. The words of John Muir started to repeat in my head, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”
So once again, the wanderlust seized me. I had to get away from the northern Virginia environs that had seemed so welcoming and new again when I returned in the fall of 2014, a respite from the recent realization I had experienced in August of that year that the place and people I had been working with were not what they had sold me; all was not as it had appeared. At first, the DC area had formed a nice distraction. As months passed, however, the novelty began to wear off, just as it had every time before.
I knew there was a place I could go to escape; to escape the rat-race surrounding me once I step foot out of doors, the daily chore of just getting to and returning home from that place where I do something from Monday through Friday just so I can do the things I really want to do on the weekends. To escape the car-horn capitol of the free world. I knew what I had to do.
I would hit the road. South.
As soon as I left the office that Friday, October 30, I turned my black Xterra west on Interstate 66 and headed toward Front Royal. My destination? Asheville and the Great American Road, Blue Ridge Parkway. Why Asheville? Three reasons primarily: (1) I have been through and to Asheville several times, and its one of my favorite places in the country, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains in far western North Carolina and a stone’s throw from the Great Smoky Mountains; it’s a unique city with interesting history; (2) it’s right along the Blue Ridge Parkway providing easy access; more than any other city except perhaps Roanoke, it is near enough to the Parkway that you don’t have to drive some snaky, twisting state or federal highway for miles and hours to get to the Parkway; and (3) Asheville is Thomas Wolfe’s hometown. I arrived in Asheville late and turned in for the long day ahead of me.
I started the following morning early by making a short pilgrimage to Wolfe’s home on North Market Street to pay my respects and garner sufficient motivation for the day ahead.
So you must by now be asking what does Thomas Wolfe have to do with Blue Ridge Parkway? Why all this background on Thomas Wolfe leading up to a story about the Blue Ridge Parkway? It’s the wanderlust thing. You figure out that you can never go home again, metaphorically, to the way it was when you were a blissful child, a high school kid, a college student with the world seemingly at the front doorstep of your future. Especially if you are blessed enough — as I have been — to reach a lot of your goals and dreams and then stand back and ask, now what? You long to return to that intangible thing that is hard to define, but you feel in your soul.
You look around and realize the closest thing to that feeling you remember is the feeling you get when you are experiencing something new, or something you’ve done many times, but that you never get tired of. These things provide a portal back to that feeling you had; not necessarily a place or experience, just a feeling; the feeling you had when everything was new and exciting and your physical and mental faculties were fully and completely engaged. That time when you were learning, living, and experiencing things for the first time. As Wolfe’s character George Webber says in You Can’t Go Home Again:
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” But I have learned that one can, indeed, recapture and go back to that feeling. And that was what I set out to do that early Saturday dawn in Asheville.
As I started to think I was lingering a bit too long at Wolfe House, I thought I heard someone shuffling up behind me and a voice saying, “You’ve spent enough time looking at this old house. You need to get going before the sun gets too high and you miss everything. The sunrise is astounding in these mountains. Go on. Get going.” I looked around and no one was there. Was that my subconscious? It was almost like Wolfe himself was speaking to me.
I had once previously started the Blue Ridge Parkway at its southern terminus near Cherokee, North Carolina, hoping to get as far north as possible, but a road-closure due to a rock slide had diverted me around some 80 miles of the road, and I had never done the full stretch of the road from near Asheville to about mile marker 160 near Blacksburg, Virginia. I had completed everything from that 160 marker to the northern terminus at Interstate 64 near Waynesboro, Virginia. But that piece I was missing was the very heart of the Parkway, running along its highest points in the remotest regions of the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. I needed to complete that last link. I needed to see and hear it. I needed to experience it.
This day I had determined to enter the Parkway at the U.S. Highway 70 crossover, just east of downtown Asheville, near mile marker 390. My final destination was the stated mile marker 160, about 25 miles east of Christiansburg, Virginia, and Interstate 81. This meant my journey would take me roughly 230 miles along the ridges of the Blue Ridge. At a top speed limit of 45 miles per hour, that translated to a trip of about seven hours, which would include many obligatory stops and pauses to observe what I knew from past experience would be spectacular vistas, including one from the highest point east of the Mississippi at Mount Mitchell in North Carolina. I also planned to stop around lunch time in the town of Boone, North Carolina, rated by many outdoor publications as one of the top mountain and college towns in the country.
I entered the Parkway near mile marker 390, just east of Asheville and spent a few minutes observing the sunrise over the mountains to the east. I continued on north and east, winding through the mountains as they and the life-giving sun gradually rose higher. Suddenly, in my peripheral vision I started seeing flickers of brilliant light coming through the trees off to my right. I had to stop and investigate.
As I continued on and the day got brighter, the full force of fall’s last weeks of color began to wash over me in the early dawn. I was afraid the leaves would be down, but I was proven wrong.
The light got stronger, the air got colder and colder, and I climbed higher and higher into the mountains. I was now on that stretch I had been denied in the past, into new territory. I felt like the explorers must have when they first set eyes on it, because thankfully, it has remained untouched by human hands.
Near mile marker 364, I pulled out of a tunnel and onto the ridge at Craggy Gardens Overlook and my jaw dropped open a touch. I was navigating a thin ridge with steep drop-offs in both directions. Clouds had rolled in quickly, and the sky was gray and foreboding, swirling as if to portend a coming storm.
The Craggy Gardens visitor center was closed for the season, but I stayed several moments to observe the miles-long views toward the east and then back to the west.
I headed on toward the highest point east of the Mississippi, Mount Mitchell, near mile marker 355. When I got there, the views did not disappoint.
The road continued to twist along thin slivers of pavement through tunnels and along the face of steep mountainsides until I got to the area of the Black Mountains near mile marker 342.
Over the next twenty-five miles the road descended toward the Linville Falls recreation area. When I arrived, I rested and took a short walk to see the Linville River. I noticed the colors over the river were still showing their splendor.
I left Linville Falls, and the Parkway started to climb once again. As I approached the most famous man-made feature on the road, I was suddenly exposed once again on a narrow ridge offering jaw-dropping vistas. I recognized the view I was looking at. I scattered gravel as I pulled over to the right side of the road and got out. I was standing on Stack Rock Creek Bridge Overlook, a place from which numerous famous photographs have been taken. So I tried to take one of my own.
Finding it a bit difficult to leave Stack Rock Creek Bridge overlook, I wondered when I was going to arrive at the most famous photographed part of the Parkway, the Linn Cove Viaduct. At a length of almost 400 meters, it cost 10-million dollars and took eight years to build, being completed in 1987. The winding bridge around Grandfather Mountain was the last piece of the Parkway to be completed, and stands as a modern engineering marvel.
I knew my journey wouldn’t be complete unless I visited Boone, North Carolina, just fifteen miles up the Parkway near mile marker 290. Boone has been consistently rated as one of the top outdoor and college towns in the nation, with a plethora of outdoor pursuits and activities. Just this past August, Outside Magazine ranked Boone the 10th ranked “best place to live” in America.
I left Boone, and continued north and east, passing over Daniel Boone’s Trace near mile marker 285, the trail blazed westward by the great America frontier hero.
When I finally turned off the Parkway at dusk with my mission completed and dropped down onto Virginia state route 8 near Floyd and headed west to Blacksburg, I was immediately wistful. Being up on the Parkway is like traveling back through time to a simpler day: quieter, slower, unshackled, boundless, and free. Even Blacksburg — itself one of my favorite outdoor and college towns — seemed crowded in comparison. But I guess compared to being up on top of the Blue Ridge mountains, anything does. “Back to the rat-race,” I heard the same voice say derisively in my head. “You really ought to consider Asheville. The folks are quite warm there. I’ve made my peace with them.”
I can still feel those ghosts — the ghosts of Thomas Wolfe and Eugene Gant and George Webber — pulling at me, whispering in my head, visiting me. But they do not haunt me; they comfort me. They remind me that the freedom of escaping is just a decision away. And that makes me smile.
Copywright 2015. All rights reserved.
